He’s got an answer for everything

Share via

Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist and public champion of “superstring theory”. Our correspondent meets the science populariser who is being hailed as a new Stephen Hawking

I AM SITTING on the ninth floor of a Columbia University building, perching awkwardly on the sole rickety chair along a white-walled corridor studded with closed pale blue doors. Occasionally, the door across the hallway clicks open and I hear snatches of conversation that make my head hurt more than the 12-hour journey from South London to the edge of Harlem.

Accompanied by the familiar sound of scribbling chalk, the talk is of constituent quark masses, baryon densities and three-flavour simulations. There is an earnest discussion about staggered fermions, whatever they are.